Recent reviews by Lord Commissar

I used to think Space Engineers was the best spaceship building game. I was wrong.

Compared to SE:
Pros:
- More responsive dev who actually takes suggestions and promptly responds to bug report
- Far more versatile blocks leading to a much wider array of shapes and vastly higher level of detail
- Far more stable ships and moving parts, again leading to far more possibilities (clang has no power here)
- Custom turrets and weapons, again leading to far more possibilities (unlike the 2 turrets KSH gave us in 6 years of broken promises)
- Heat and Power balancing leads to an engineering challenge that is unique to this game. This, combined with the custom weapons means that you can make very unique ships and optimize them in a way that is completely unachievable in SE. It is ironic that, while this game lacks the same level of physics and realism that SE has, it certainly necessitates a higher level of optimization than SE does.
- Far better performance, combat mechanics, full solar systems and galaxy to explore, and so on.

Cons:
- Less realism
- Not a fan of the character art style personally, but I'll get over it
- Game is much younger and earlier in development and thus lacks things that SE has like pressurization, walking on planets, missiles, and projectile weapons (we have lasers). However, the dev has stated he plans to add these things and the game already shows far more potential than its stagnating alternative.
- Multiplayer exists but is weird and not fully realized yet. But it is in the works.
- Community is much smaller, so the Workshop is quieter. However, the higher level of detail means that checking out WS creations is a much more satisfying experience.

Conclusion:
- Get the game!

There is a lot to like about this game, but i wound up returning it.
It runs much smoother than the first game, and the micro-managing is definitely easier. However, as some have said, some of the factional flavor has been lost in the lack of customization. For example, Nurgle ships are now purely cosmetic. They no longer have plague clouds. To me, anything that takes away the flavor of the universe is always a bad thing. IMO the soundtrack is also worse (but still very good on its own).

The above I can live with, but one issue I had with the first game got much worse: Mission types.
Where in the first game you couldn't choose, it at least allowed you to cycle randomly through types. This one only has one mission type (capture points), which forces your fleets into predictable formations and increases the already large need for heavy micro-managing. This, in turn, means that players play with fewer, larger ships to minimize said micro, again lowering the variability of gameplay (not to mention the fact that such fleets tend to be more effective as well).

If the game existed by itself, I'd keep it. Since I already have the first game, though, I'll just stick with that.